It was a busy day on site today but the team managed to make a brilliant discovery of a tessellated floor. This pavement is in a room that occupies an area that Hayward had thought was outside of the villa entirely.

At the start of the day, James G was hoping to work off some of Josh’s excess energy by having him, Jeff, Frankie and Elliot hack out some of the overlying rubble deposits in the North East corner of the trench.

However, after a near miss with the mattock, Elliot struck some tesserae. These quickly grew into what was clearly a full paved floor. The pavement is suffering from some subsidence but otherwise appears at the moment to be a plain grey floor.

Elsewhere in the trench, Hayley, Doug and James B worked hard to record and take off the clay layer which was overlying the burnt deposit on the east side of the trench. They topped the day off by taking a micromorphology sample from their deposit and cleaning up the surrounding contexts.

Becca and Lucy continued their adventures in archaeological recording by planning walls and contexts for the whole day while Freddie cleaned up the loose over the walls and Tilly worked on the water pipe channel in the Southern end of the trench.

The team are all very excited about their new discovery and are looking forward to finishing their work in Lufton soon.